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Making a List

January 28, 2024 //
2

I’m sitting at the trailhead, waiting for the sun. I use the time to meditate, which doesn’t use all the time I have for waiting. I sit quietly awhile, reflecting on life, generally, and looking out over the seasonal lake on the other side of the highway observing the way the clouds and water reflect distant lights. I listen to the sounds of traffic, and my ceaseless tinnitus.

I take a moment to make a packing list for my upcoming weekend trip to the coast. I decided last night to take a paint box with me, and maybe spend some time painting seascapes and coastal landscapes. Should be fun and relaxing. My packing list completed, I update my to-do list for today, too. It’s not a lot, but the meal I plan to make for dinner has some specifics that will drag my ass into the kitchen for some tidying up, and I definitely need to finish doing the dishes so the kitchen will be ready for cooking a proper meal later. I’m making a Bolognese sauce and I plan to make enough to have some left to set aside for my Traveling Partner to enjoy while I am gone.

The day feels planned. Even the next few days seem pretty well laid out. Oh, for sure my lived experience will have some variations from anything I’ve put on a fucking list; the map is not the world. Still, I feel prepared, and that’s a feeling I like.

I breathe, exhale, and relax. This is a pleasant quiet moment, as I wait for the sun. The weather is unseasonably mild, and it’s not raining. I sit quietly, enjoying the moment for what it is before I begin again.

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Categories art and the artist, breathe, Free Will, gratitude, Healthy Living, inspiration, Love, meditation, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Moments, Oregon Trails, Perspective, Practices, solo hiking, The Art of Being, winter

Sour Milk

January 8, 2024 //
1

I sat down with my coffee to write a few words, after a restless, interrupted night’s sleep (I woke several times, though I only got up twice, quite briefly), and a somewhat tense commute. Humans being human. I started with “No Good-Guys” as my working title, because I started my day already disappointed in humanity. Mine. Everyone else’s. Just… yeah. All kinds of annoyance with the fundamentals of people doing the things people do. I mean, ffs, even children don’t get a pass (a six year old shoots a teacher?! a 10-year old shoots a friend over a bicycle race?? what the hell?) – the world feels very messy, chaotic, and whether I view the world through the lens of the media reporting, or simply my own day-to-day experience of self and others… it’s not looking good. I’m disappointed and vexed by both the circumstances that find me feeling this way, and the feeling itself.

…Emotions are not reality, I remind myself, the map is not the world…

I breathe, exhale, relax – and sip my coffee. What can I do better, myself? Probably a fucking lot. I could do more to communicate more clearly and more gently. I could work harder/more attentively at being a good listener. Good places to start. Probably for 100% of everyone out there, it would at least be a worthy starting point.

I sigh out loud. It breaks the stillness in this quiet morning place. I haven’t lost my interest in living – that’s something, anyway. I sit with my thoughts awhile. I think mostly about love, and how irksome it is that loving well and deeply over time isn’t easier than it seems to be (at least for me, with my hearty helping of chaos and damage, and a lifetime of baggage to deal with). The work involved in being the human being I most want to be, reliably, consistently, skillfully… fucking hell, it’s a lot of work. Sisyphean just about covers it. Every step forward on this path seems followed by some irritating detour or setback, and I find myself harshly judgmental of my efforts and deeply critical of my failures. I could do better there, too.

In a moment of harsh words, my Traveling Partner asked me to “set a better example”, to “model the behavior” I’m asking for, and to “show what that looks like”… which, strangely, caught me by surprise with A) its utter reasonableness and B) how truly difficult that looked in my head when I gave it a moment of thought, later. Yeesh. Fucking human primates – we think we know what we want, but again and again we set ourselves up for failure. We’re not actually all that good at being wise, or being kind, or being consistent, or being nurturing, or being positive, or being supportive, or being open, or… I guess what I’m saying is that this is a difficult journey in spots.

…I find myself asking “am I the bad guy?”, and having to admit that at least sometimes, yeah, I totally am. Well, shit. Okay, then. I guess I’ve got to work on that…

My coffee manages to go cold between the start and end of this fairly brief bit of writing, today. It’s a reflection of how often I stopped to ponder some point at length, and how deeply I am thinking some of this over, although I don’t think I’m really “getting anywhere” – at least not yet. There are more thoughts to think, more practices to practice, more work to be done – the journey is long, and there is no map. I guess I’ve just got to begin again.

Again.

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Categories Allegories, anger, Anxiety, Brain Injury, breathe, Despair, forgiveness, Frustration, gratitude, grief, Healthy Living, inspiration, loneliness, Love, meditation, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Moments, more than a little bit of bitching, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Practices, Relationships, Sleepless Nights, The Big 5, War and News of War, winter, Words

Winging It

November 8, 2023 //
0

I had planned to work from home today. I woke in such a completely offensive bad mood I couldn’t stick with that plan without willfully (and inconsiderately) exposing my Traveling Partner to my unpleasant state of mind. It made sense to take advantage of a commute to the city to (try to) sort myself out, and work in the office instead of dragging my shitty attitude around the house all day. I’m probably fortunate that the day is off to a relatively good start in spite of my nasty mood and this headache… I sip my coffee, already lukewarm and uninteresting, and let time pass without being too invested in what follows any given minute.

I woke early, although I had set my alarm a bit later than usual, figuring on the work-from-home thing, and planning to take a pleasant early morning walk, but when I woke it was from a bad dream, and as I said, I was in a foul mood (maybe because of the dream, maybe because my partner woke me early for some reason, maybe because headaches suck…? Does it matter at all?). It didn’t make sense to stick with a plan that had been made from a very different cognitive and emotional place.

Daybreak catches up with me at the office. I have a sense of time passing, moment by moment, and I sort of wish I’d stayed home, after all, but omg I am in such a shitty mood… I can’t see inflicting that on anyone else (especially not my beloved), and I’m alone here in the office until much later in the day, on a typical Wednesday. I sip my coffee. Drink some water. Remind myself to stay on top of my medication – pausing for a brief moment of irritation that that’s a thing I need to remind myself about at all. I snarl to myself about aging and how much that sucks.

My Traveling Partner was super chill about my last-minute fairly spontaneous pivot to working from the office today. (He made a point of saying he’d miss me…but I suspect if he knew the mood I’m in, that might not be the case. lol) I hope he has a pleasant day, relaxed and fun, doing whatever he likes; the whole point of getting the hell out of there before anything could go sideways was specifically to do what little I could in the moment to secure a pleasant day for us both. Or at least for him. I sigh outloud in this big quiet space. My back aches. My head aches. My sinuses are kind of stuffy. I’m cranky.

…Oh, hell… am I coming down with a cold or something…? I sure hope not, I’ve got shit to do…

I recall that I committed to taking out the recycling last night, and also to do the dishes today… but now I’m not there, and I find myself vexed by the whole mess far more than is necessary, or reasonable. I’m aggravated on a whole other level. Should I have paused to do those things before I left the house? Could I have done so without erupting in misdirected rage over… nothing? Could I have done so without making an infernal racket inappropriate to the early hour? I seethe over it for some minutes, not because it’s an appropriate response, or because it’s helpful, it’s just where my head is, this morning. I’m cross. I’m annoyed with shit. I’m… an unpleasant and unapproachable version of myself. At least for the moment.

I seek a distraction from my negative thinking. I think about my Traveling Partner, and the latest super cute prints from the new 3D printers – an adorable squad of Pikachu. He’d said something earlier about planning to give one of them to me (for my desktop “menagerie” of things). The thought delights me as much now as when he mentioned it earlier, and for a moment I’m smiling.

…I’ve still got this headache, though, and I’m still feeling super bitchy…

I fucking hate nightmares and feel about the same toward headaches. I sigh again, and sip my coffee, feeling that “it’s all rather pointless” – but without knowing what I mean by that. The bad mood? The pain I’m in? The gray skies beyond these windows? The work day ahead of me? My lingering recollection of my bad dream? I feel bleak, bitter, cynical, vexed, and disappointed with humanity. G’damn. lol It’s much.

…Perhaps a fresh (better) cup of coffee will improve my mood…?

Well, regardless what else I decide to do, I clearly need to begin again.

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Categories Allegories, anger, anhedonia, Anxiety, autumn, Brain Injury, breathe, Frustration, health, Moments, more than a little bit of bitching, pain, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Practices, Relationships, The Art of Being, War and News of War

Taking Time for the Time It Takes

September 30, 2023 //
0

I’m tentatively sipping this fresh (quite hot) cup of coffee and endeavoring to avoid burning my mouth, while savoring the goodness of a still-hot cup of coffee on a Saturday morning. I’m still working on (with the help of my Traveling Partner) bringing my new laptop properly to life as the machine I understand so well (and which seems to understand me).

One careless misstep resulted in having to fight off the cancer that is OneDrive (omg, spare me, ffs) – I rather stupidly let that thing begin syncing my files, unaware that it was set to do so (no doubt through some earlier carelessness or lack of understanding)… wouldn’t have been such an issue if I were not also a user of DropBox for backing up my files, and had allowed that to have sync turned on and permitted to run in the background “for convenience” (omg, no no no no!!!)… the result? A crazy loop of OneDrive and DropBox seeking to back (each other) up continuously… and we’re talking about many tens of thousands of high resolution photographs, and multitudes of gigabytes of documents preserved over many decades (that through my own insecurity about “losing my memories”, had become multiple copies of copies of copied folders – in some cases also including .zip versions of those very same nested multiplicative folders and files). It was a fucking nightmare. In point of fact, an actual literal nightmare, because I dreamt through the night last night of having lost just the one and only precious file that actually mattered, because I did not realize it was stored as a single copy on fucking OneDrive – and had deleted all that content out of frustration without checking for that file. Omg. For real though?

Fuuuuuuuuuck. Okay. So. Frustrated raised voices and a few tears later, followed by careful slow conversation on the level one would have with a fairly stupid child (thanks, though, Love, I get it now)… and I think we’ve got this shit sorted out… only…

…new laptop. There may be a hardware issue; the monitor was flickering (unacceptable). I think my Traveling Partner resolved that with skilled troubleshooting in the display settings. G’damn I appreciate the depth of his expertise on this crap – I have not kept up my technical knowledge, as so often happens with “use it or lose it” sorts of things, and I’m clearly very far behind the state-of-the-art OS-wise! I could have seriously borked my new laptop if I had proceeded to simply delete a bunch of (to me) suspicious looking OS files. LOL (“Okay, Boomer…”)

Breathe through it; it’ll be okay.

Yeah. She’s here. She “lives and breathes” – as much as she can as a machine. I know, I know; she’s not actually conscious, sentient, or a living being. I just rely on this tool to the point that “she” feels personal and real to me on a level beyond machinery… like a motorhead with a favorite car. I’m okay with that.

(Note: AI is not yet a thing, y’all, just stop. We’ve got some fancy machine learning tools, but those tools are not “AI”; they do not think and can not reason or understand the material they ingest or the content they spit out. Not yet, so just fucking stop sucking down the marketing hype.)

So… definitely needed this 2nd coffee, and I’m trying to enjoy it before it goes cold. 😀

…Because it’s already time to begin again, and I’ve got shit to do in both the real and virtual worlds. Life is short, and time passes all too quickly. 😀

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Categories Allegories, Anxiety, art and the artist, autumn, Brain Injury, breathe, forgiveness, Free Will, Frustration, gratitude, Love, meditation, Metaphors, Moments, more than a little bit of bitching, Perspective, Relationships, The Art of Being

Over It

August 30, 2023 //
0

I’m starting the day grateful. Feels like I’m finally over this cold, and my interview yesterday went very well. I may be back to work quite soon… interesting to contemplate. The morning began relatively well, and I find myself in a good mood, feeling contented and somewhat merry. Hopeful. Steady. Centered. A good beginning to the day, indeed.

I’ve got my second cup of coffee and a bit of time until my next call (a follow-up with the hiring manager for the company I interviewed with yesterday). I sat down expecting I’d write awhile, but I am finding I’ve little to say. It’s a good moment for observation and for presence… but I’ve little to say about it. I am here. The moment is now. It’s enough.

…In a moment like this one, there’s no need to rush headlong into the next moment. I sit quietly with my coffee and my thoughts, until it is properly time to begin again.

…Take a minute for yourself…
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Categories Allegories, Anxiety, Brain Injury, breathe, Free Will, gratitude, Healthy Living, inspiration, meditation, Mindfulness, Moments, Oregon Trails, Perspective, Practices, Summer, The Art of Being
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